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User blog:Taldin/Some thoughts on redesigning the Boss/Quest Lists... Again
Just doing some brainstorming and woolgathering here for a moment; feel free to jump in if you have ideas. Here's the problem we have that I'm seeing. We have a scalability issue. Every month, we come out with a new quest. Sometimes it's a chain quest, sometimes it's a boss quest, but back when I first joined Habitica, there were only seven quests (the Fiery Phoenix, the Rat King, the Hedgebeast, the Spirit of Spring, and the three Vice Quests, plus the Santa quests that weren't available.) Since then, we've added over 20 more quests, including multiple three-chain quests, (The Laundromancer, the Knights, and the Necromancer for artifacts, plus the Undersea one), and what was once a simple list has become a larger beast of a list that won't get any smaller. Don't get me wrong, new content is what keeps people coming back, and once a month is not a bad schedule. But it gets harder to organize things in the game and on the Wiki as we keep adding to the growing pile of quests and eggs and stuff. How can we best address this? *''Create separate categories''? Putting on my writer's hat for a moment, generally when a category gets too big, we start creating subcategories. But even that is a stopgap solution, and the majority of the bosses are combat bosses. Right now I'm noodling around with splitting them up by difficulty, since there's been some work on automated templates based on said difficulty courtesy of Numberland that would go with it. *''"Retire" some quests''? The seasonal quests fall into this category, in that they're only available for a limited time, and then only for gems. Pulling the 2014 quests into a Historical quests group and making them available only at New Years or Derby day or something would get them out of the Market list and the main Quests list (similar to Seasonal Gear) and also help with the backlog of gems people have. Granted, this doesn't help people who haven't been here since 2014....(Probably not this one, after some discussion.) *''Create a Filter''. I don't know that this is possible on the Wikia, but if it is, being able to cut down the list to a custom size ('only pet quests', 'item quests'...'2014 quests..' ) would have a similar effect as Separate Categories. *''Create a jump link from Habitica Itself''. This will take some coordination between the programmers and the Wikia authors, where the quest scroll has a link to a Wikia page that might not yet exist when the quest goes live. All of us have been really good at jumping on the new quest page pretty much the same day when the quest appears, so rather than go through the cumbersome Quests or Bosses pages, if you can find out more info directly from the game, that might be cool. Feel free to add other ideas here -- I'm more thinking out loud right now. Taldin (talk) 19:05, December 1, 2015 (UTC) Category:Blog posts